Dribble Glasses and Joy Buzzers

This year marks a number of American hundredth anniversaries—Yellow Cab, Wrigley Field, the foxtrot—but spare a moment to consider the centenary of Johnson Smith & Company. The name may not jolt your memory, but a zap from one of its joy buzzers will. Anyone who has picked up a comic book, mail-ordered X-Ray Glasses, or ever been nine years old can recall the ads: the cramped type, the Depression-era line art, the promise of “Fooling Your Friends.” The company is still around, though the exploding cigars and the press that magically turns a blank piece of paper into a dollar bill are long gone.

The Johnson Smith catalogue itself, though, was always the real thing of wonder. It was started by the Australian immigrant Alfred Johnson Smith, and the company set up shop in Chicago, where the mail-order industry was burgeoning with the advent of rural delivery. Smith’s wares were more modest than the pianos and kit homes sold by Montgomery Ward and Sears—Sneezing Powder (“for PARTIES, POLITICAL MEETINGS, CAR RIDES … it is the GREATEST JOKE OUT”) went for just ten cents, and Invisible Ink (“used extensively by secret service agents”) for fifteen cents. But Smith was no less ambitious than the majors in his salesmanship, and by the end of the nineteen-twenties his catalogue had grown into a seven-hundred-and-sixty-eight-page behemoth.

Musing over the Johnson Smith catalogue in a January 12, 1935, piece for The New Yorker, Robert Coates found that it wasn’t all dribble glasses and joy buzzers: “There are many pages in which a note of grimness is apparent…. There are slot machine slugs … marked cards … and if the friends’ amazement grows too embarrassing, brass knuckles, known as ‘Silent Defenders,’ and even tear-gas guns.” For those seeking more placid pursuits, the catalogue also sold cheap brooches and sheet music, as well as a $12.50 movie projector: “Be a Movie King. Oh Boy! Some Sport!”

The essay inspired a letter to the magazine, never published, by a twenty-five-year-old Eudora Welty—pencilled edits on the manuscript show that it nearly ran, but her print début would remain a year away. In her letter, Welty recalls buying a Remarkable Firefly Plant (nineteen cents) from the catalogue, as well as a booklet on to how to flirt via secret messages. “You may have noticed that the stamp on this letter was in the lower left hand corner, upside down,” she teased. “Do you know what that meant? It meant I love you.” Her real prize possession, though, was the Johnson Smith ten-cent Sex Indicator: “We children held it over our mother one night when she had nothing else to do and found out she was a man…. There was nothing we could say, or Mother either; we just rose and filed out.”

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When Coates and Welty were writing, in 1935, the novelty catalogue was still novel. After a bankruptcy brought on by massive printing costs, the Johnson Smith company never quite recaptured its Anarchist Stink Bomb grandeur of old. Yet Johnson Smith lived on in seemingly every comic book, right down to the Action Comics No. 1 début of Superman. By 1970, when the 1929 catalogue was reissued by Chelsea House in a slipcased hardcover edition, complete with an introduction by Jean Shepherd, it was part of the American subconscious. “It might well be the Rosetta Stone of American culture,” Shepherd concluded, in a bit of hyperbole worthy of the catalogue itself.

And yet, also like the catalogue copy, Shepherd’s claim is not entirely misleading. The premise was enough to pique the writer Stanley Elkin, who called upon the Johnson Smith warehouse for his 1974 Esquire profile “A la Recherche du Whoopee Cushion.” It’s a fascinating glimpse at Paul Smith, the son of the late founder. His is an archetypal second-generation immigrant story—a math and physics major at the University of Wisconsin, a man fond of reading Martin Buber, Smith found himself the rather unwilling inheritor of his father’s gag business, a philosopher among the fart cushions.

Among the essay’s revelations were that until the Second World War, many classic practical-joke items came from Germany—maybe not the first place you’d associate with a humor industry, but about which the proprietor was duly philosophical. “There’s an element of sadism in almost any practical joke,” Smith explained. “To an extent, humor is retaliatory. A leveler.” Even as Elkin was revisiting the past, children were still being imprinted with such wondrously disappointing nineteen-seventies products as the Hercules Wrist Band and the U-Control 7-Foot Life-Size Ghost. Some of the old gags had disappeared—the blackface kits were quietly shelved, and the itching and sneezing powders lost out to liability worries—but the soul of Johnson Smith never really changed. That, perhaps, was exactly the company’s dilemma. After breaking up the grand catalogue and launching the first of many specialty spinoffs in the eighties, its president was blunt about the old book’s focus on boys. “They use it until they’re about sixteen or seventeen years old,” he explained to a reporter. “We lose them when they start getting interested in girls.”

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Maybe nothing could live up to the promise of those ads: a literal-minded F.T.C. investigated the company in the nineteen-forties for misrepresentation, and the 2011 book “Mail-Order Mysteries” gleefully compared the come-on with what you actually received. Not all the products were disappointing, though: the Spy Pen Radio was pretty good, and the shipments of live chameleons arrived as promised, to the dismay of mothers everywhere. But the old Johnson Smith & Co. was never really about customer satisfaction—it was about customer imagination. The early catalogues are a potent manifestation of pure childish desire. No matter how impossible the promises, kids kept ordering anyway; it was a triumph of rich anticipation over cheap reality.

Paul Smith mused that his father really thought of himself, first and foremost, as a writer. Perhaps what made the 1929 catalogue so peculiarly appealing is that singular authorial vision: its seven-hundred-plus densely set pages were largely written by Alfred Johnson Smith himself. But the reason his copy fit hand in joy-buzzered glove with the illustrations is that both were stylized. Early on (certainly by this 1916 Popular Mechanics ad), A.J. Smith hit upon his signature look, which depended on numerous woodcuts. He commissioned forests of them by Chicago commercial artists—work that lives on today in every graphic artist’s blood, not least the droll iconography of Chris Ware’s Acme Novelty Library. The power of the images comes from sheer repetition of endless rainy afternoons with comic books, but also from something more: Smith’s intuitive decision to use figurative illustration. A photograph would be a letdown, a crash to earth. Until your sadly deflated gimcrack arrived, you could live in the mental space of those woodcuts, luxuriate in the boy-oh-boy of those verbal hyperboles.

And it still works. Last week, my young son picked up the old catalogue, unaware it was directed at his great-grandparents, and flipped past the return address for a long-emptied Racine warehouse. Drawn by some boyhood homing instinct, he instinctively laid his finger on the ad for a twenty-five-cent whoopee cushion. “It gives forth noises that can better be imagined than described,” it promised. “Dad!” he asked. “Can I order this?”

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